CFD Simulations of the Refueling of Long Horizontal H2 Tanks

The  understanding  of  physical  phenomena  occurring  during  the  refueling  of  H2  tanks  used for hydrogen mobility applications is the key point towards the most optimal refueling protocol. A lot of experimental investigations on tank refueling were performed in the previous years, for different types and sizes of tank. Several operating conditions were tested through these experiments. For instance, the HyTransfer project gave one of the major outputs on the understanding of the physical phenomena occurring during a tank refueling. From a numerical perspective, the availability of accurate numerical tools is another key point. Such tools could be used instead of the experimental set-ups to test various operating conditions or new designs of tanks and injectors. The use of these tools can reduce the cost of the refueling protocol development in the future. However, they first need to be validated versus experimental data. This work is dedicated to CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modeling of the hydrogen refueling of a long horizontal 530L type IV tank. As of now, the number of available CFD simulations for  such  a large  tank  is  low  as  the  computational  cost  is  significant  which  is  often considered as a bottleneck for this approach. The simulated operating conditions correspond to one of the  experimental  campaigns  performed  in  the  framework  of  the  HyTransfer  project. The  3D  CFD model is presented. In a first validation step, the CFD results are compared with experimental data. Then,  a  deeper  insight  into  the  physics  predicted  by  the  CFD  is  provided.   Finally,  two  other methodologies  with  the  aim  to  reduce  the  computational  cost  have   been  tested.